This seven-minute video highlights the work of the Fulcrum Institute for Education in Science. Teachers speak about how attending the institute has affected their pedagogy as well as their personal intellectual growth.
Tufts University along
with TERC, and Malden
Public School District (of Malden, Massachusetts), have
created the Fulcrum Institute for Education in Science, a
two-year series of graduate courses for experienced K-8
teachers funded by the
Math/Science Partnership Program of
National
Science Foundation.
The Institute aims to prepare a group of Educators in Science who will implement
and lead research-centered science learning and teaching in their schools and
districts. Participants advance their professional knowledge and status through
the Institute's credit-bearing, three-course sequence.
The Vision
Institute graduates will become teacher leaders who understand science more
deeply and promote it in their classrooms and schools. Such leaders know from
their personal experience that thinking needs to be grounded in observation, yet
nurtured by competing claims and possibilities.
These practitioners elicit students' ideas about scientific phenomena, encourage
students to make careful observations, to draw their own conclusions, and to
discuss their evidence, methods and interpretations with fellow students; and
they skillfully intervene -- through example, explanation, questioning. They
document their own teaching and students' learning and share their data and
findings with colleagues, including pre-service teachers in their classrooms.
These educators regard science as more than a body of existing knowledge; they
view it as a means for understanding phenomena, for figuring things out in the
world around them.
